John Plotz is Mandel Professor of Humanities at Brandeis University and editor of the B-Sides feature in Public Books. He co-hosts the podcast Recall This Book.  His books include The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (University of California Press, 2000), Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton University Press, 2008),  Semi-Detached: Aesthetic Experience from Dickens to Keaton (Princeton University Press, 2017) and My Reading: Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea  (forthcoming, Oxford, 2022).